WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS
Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ I Returned as a God ◈
Chapter 86: The Temple (3)
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Jihan was not in a good mood.
His plan had been to finish off Eunyoung, then call Kang Hangyeol out.
Jihan had been through all kinds of nonsense by now, but the one time he'd gotten completely one-sided beat down by Hangyeol was something he could never shake off, no matter how hard he tried.
Everything had gone sideways because of that bastard.
If anyone had a right to be angry here, it was Jihan, not the thing standing in front of him.
[Fool, foolish, cannot win, in this world, mine.]
The countless fragments that had scattered into thousands of pieces reformed into a single mass.
The shapeless giant's mouth tore open, stretching long and wide.
[Kill, the one who, obstructs.]
The words had barely finished when Jihan swung his sword in a long arc.
Following the sword's path, the massive arm was severed and dropped.
"Sure, do that."
Gripping his sword one-handed, Jihan charged straight at Jung Hyeonseong, who was controlling the giant.
Watching from a short distance away, Eunyoung stopped the step she'd been about to take toward them.
Her mind was a mess.
Would I even help?
It was a helplessness she'd never felt once since becoming a Hunter.
Maybe it went deeper than that, even.
Demigod or not, a god was still a god.
There was no way she'd ever imagined something like fighting a god. Not a monster, a god.
Jihan was strong.
Knowing that in her head and seeing it with her own two eyes were completely different things.
He dodged the relentless barrage of attacks with the bare minimum of movement, never missing a beat to counter through every opening.
Each casual swing carried enough force that even Eunyoung, standing far off, could feel it.
This wasn't skill that came together in a short amount of time.
Only someone who had crossed the line between life and death hundreds of times, maybe more, could move like that.
Ability, talent, experience, all of it was on a completely different level.
Whatever he'd shown at the amusement park hadn't even scratched the surface.
How did Hangyeol ever manage to take this guy down?
The more she thought about it, the more the question just sat there, unanswered.
Strength aside, Jihan's personality was anything but easygoing.
Even the little she'd seen of him told her that much.
This guy was a vicious piece of work.
Jihan cut the giant's body clean down the middle, then did a backflip and landed in front of Eunyoung.
The giant, split into two halves, changed shape and lunged again.
It was like clay.
Cut it, and it split. Recombined, and it changed form.
"Endless, huh."
Jihan muttered, dragging his sword down in a slash.
Something was needed to break this deadlock.
Jihan did another backflip and landed lightly in front of Eunyoung.
Eunyoung spoke to his back.
"Hey, can't we try talking this out?"
"Are you out of your mind?"
Jihan swung his sword to the side.
A purple slash collided with an incoming attack, exploding and vanishing in midair.
Jihan gripped his sword tight without turning around.
"You think I'd be doing this if that thing could actually talk?"
"You're the one who charged in without asking anything either."
If they traced the whole fight back to its cause, wasn't it Jihan who'd started it by cutting off the arm of the demigod Jung Hyeonseong?
Anyone would get angry if someone just came at them and lopped off an arm first.
"So what?"
"No, I mean, the arm..."
"You think losing one arm is some big injury to that thing?"
Hyeonseong's severed arm had already grown back to normal.
"Still... you went way overboard."
Eunyoung couldn't wrap her head around Jihan's attitude.
Wasn't it strange to jump to conclusions without even hearing the other side out first?
Jihan swung his sword upward in a wide arc.
A massive explosion tore through the space where the blade had passed.
"I can tell just by looking."
"You planning to keep fighting?"
Instead of answering Eunyoung, Jihan twisted his body and pointed his sword tip at the empty air.
A line formed in midair, and a huge arm reached out through the gap.
Monsters started emerging through the rift.
Not just one or two, either.
"Wha, what is this! Why are monsters coming out of here?"
"Bossless dungeon."
"Guess this was his doing all along."
She watched the monsters appear one after another.
Most of them were boss-tier.
A hail of arrows rained down over Eunyoung and Jihan's heads.
Eunyoung took to the air using Blessing of Wings.
Jihan's sword, already far off, was aimed at the demigod Jung Hyeonseong.
As Eunyoung looked down from above, a massive tail came flying at her from the side.
She caught it with one hand out of pure reflex.
The monster swinging the tail was an Iron Worm, a boss-tier monster found in C-Rank dungeons.
Eunyoung grabbed the Iron Worm's tail with both arms.
"I can't take this anymore!"
Still holding the tail, she spun her body and hurled the creature into the monsters clustered nearby.
She poured mana into Ishtar's Ring, and sacred flame flickered to life at her toes.
She twisted slightly and kicked downward.
The instant her foot landed, a massive burst of fire erupted through the divine temple.
"This... this is amazing."
The surviving monsters closed in around Eunyoung.
She clenched her ringed fist tight.
While Jihan handled Hyeonseong, Eunyoung took care of the monsters.
Most were D or C-Rank bosses, but a boss was still a boss.
There were a lot of them, and scattered among them were a few higher-tier monsters too.
Eunyoung snapped her fingers, and a wall of fire rose up in front of her feet.
She wasn't used to it, but it felt almost like casting magic.
Ishtar's Ring was a mythic-grade item that let her freely command sacred flame, limited only by how much mana she had.
Eunyoung, whose combat instincts had never lagged behind anyone's, picked up the ring's use in no time.
Shhh.
After killing another monster, something slipped past in front of her.
She rubbed her eyes after kicking a Giant Orc's head clean off.
A blurry shape.
Not a monster.
"A... a ghost? No, that can't be it."
Looking closer, it was a woman.
Dressed in white, long black hair loose around her.
The woman slipped between the monsters and pointed a finger somewhere.
At an empty patch of black floor. Nothing there at all.
"Hey! You trying to die or something!?"
Jihan's voice rang out from above.
Blades Jihan had conjured rained down over Eunyoung's head.
The sharp phantom blades skewered the heads of the monsters clustered around her.
Eunyoung snapped back to her senses fast.
A massive pincer blocked her view.
The monster split cleanly in two by Jihan's sword collapsed to the side.
"Th, thanks."
Jihan swung the blood off his sword once through the air and looked in the direction Eunyoung's gaze had been fixed on.
To Jihan, Eunyoung had looked like she'd been in some kind of trance.
"What's over there?"
"There was a woman."
"A woman?"
"Black hair, white clothes. She looked like she was pointing at something over there."
"Hold this a second."
Jihan spun on his heel fast.
Eunyoung's face went pale as she looked at the black stone statue standing in front of her, monsters and all.
"Hey!! What am I supposed to do with this?!"
A massive fist came bearing down on her, and Eunyoung threw her hand out, pouring every last drop of mana she had into Ishtar's Ring.
A swirling shield of fire barely managed to block the blow.
Unlike Eunyoung, who felt like she was about to die, Jihan poked at the ground with the tip of his sword.
The sword in his hand vanished, then reappeared as a different one.
"What are you doing?"
Before Eunyoung could even ask, Jihan drew a line across the ground.
A clean cut split the earth apart, and a rift formed along it, similar to the one the monsters had come through.
Light shimmered from beyond the widening gap.
"Wait, ugh. I can't hold on much longer... hey!!"
Without a second thought, Jihan threw himself into the rift.
He could've at least told her to follow him first!
Her mana all but drained, Eunyoung threw herself into the rift just as it began to close.
The massive fist crushed the flames Eunyoung had summoned completely flat.
Where the fire and smoke had been, nothing remained.
Eunyoung was falling.
She couldn't see anything, but she could feel that she was falling.
So she had to be falling. That much was clear.
Light appeared below her feet.
The light, no bigger than a dot at first, grew steadily larger.
She raised her head and her eyes met Jihan's.
"Catch m..."
Thud.
Jihan had spotted something and shifted position, so Eunyoung slammed straight into the ground, head first.
Thankfully, the impact from the fall wasn't too bad.
Bright indoor lighting poured down around her.
"Ow, ow, ow, that hurts."
Sitting up on the white floor, Eunyoung let out her complaints at Jihan.
"Hey! You're really taking this too far! Would it kill you to at least pretend to catch someone... wait, huh?"
Eunyoung looked around.
It was the scenery of an ordinary personal office.
At the desk in the middle of the room sat the woman Eunyoung had seen before, perched on the edge of it.
Not white clothes this time. Plain jeans, and a shirt with a hint of purple.
Eunyoung stared at her, dumbstruck.
The woman wasn't dressed up in any special way, and yet her face seemed to glow.
Less pretty, more elegant. That was closer to the feeling.
Jihan pointed his sword at the woman.
"Who are you?"
"That, that's absolutely a habit of his."
Eunyoung clicked her tongue watching Jihan level his sword.
She had no idea where he'd picked up the habit of pointing a sword at people the second he met them.
Eunyoung brushed the dust off and got to her feet.
"Um, sorry about him. He's kind of stupidly strong, but I think he traded his personality for it somewhere along the way. Please bear with him."
"The second we get out of here, you're dying first."
Hearing Eunyoung's words, Jihan's eyes flared.
At first it had actually been kind of scary. Now she didn't even know what to call it anymore.
There was a part of her that had started to just not care anymore.
Eunyoung threw her hands up and sighed.
"Kill me, go on, kill me!"
"I really will kill you!"
"Yeah! You'll really kill me. You gonna kill me fake? Kill me, spare me, do whatever you want!"
"Like you'd actually die quietly if I tried."
At Jihan's muttering, Eunyoung swallowed a laugh.
"I said kill me. Never said I'd die for you."
"Damn it, why is it that every single follower of the god Soter is like this?"
Kang Hangyeol was bad enough, but Song Eunyoung was clearly no ordinary case either.
Jihan had no idea that comment was basically spitting in his own face.
Jihan sheathed his sword, and the blade at his hip vanished in an instant.
"That's a pretty enviable skill."
Jihan could pull out weapons or items whenever he wanted, seemingly at will.
It looked convenient, sure, but from the perspective of whoever he was fighting, there was no telling how many weapons he had on him, which made him all the more dangerous to deal with.
If a game's item inventory feature actually existed in real life, it'd probably look exactly like that.
Jihan turned his head away, apparently deciding Eunyoung's comment wasn't worth answering.
The woman just watched them, staying silent.
Something crossed Eunyoung's mind.
She poked Jihan's side.
"Hey."
"What."
"You said you'd kill me first the second we get out of here, right?"
"Want me to do it now?"
"So does that mean we're not outside right now?"
At that exact moment, the huge window turned pitch black.
It was a darkness like someone had pasted black construction paper over the glass.
"Then where are we?"
"A gap."
"A gap?"
"Yeah. Not exactly rare."
Jihan took a step forward.
This divine temple belonged to Beritaas.
Whatever her taboo was, I don't know, but she broke it.
As far as Jihan could remember, there was only one follower of Beritaas capable of creating a gap inside a corrupted divine temple.
The only S-Rank Hunter among Beritaas's followers. A Transcendent.
"Are you Yu Chaeyoung?"
"Yu Chaeyoung, isn't that the Hunter who died during the great disaster?"
"Guess you know her, then."
"It's not that I know her, it's just... never mind. More importantly, Yu Chaeyoung? What the hell is going on here?"
Eunyoung raised her head to look at the woman Jihan had just called Yu Chaeyoung.
Footnotes:
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